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An anonymous reader writes "Google today announced Google Now is coming to the Chrome stable channel for Windows and Mac 'starting today and rolling out over the next few weeks.' This means Google Now notifications will finally be available to desktop and laptop Chrome users, in addition to Android and iOS users. To turn the feature on, all you need to do is sign in to Chrome with the same Google Account you're using for Google Now on mobile. If you use Google Now on multiple devices, you will need to manage your location settings for each device independently (change Location Reporting on Android and iOS)."

I have location services turned off for most things.
You can also turn off background updates for any apps, including Google's: Settings -> General - Background App Refresh
Prevents the app pinging away and having them geolocate you through your IP as you travel around.

Interface changes, surprisingly bloaty, crashed all the time... I've been using Chrome since it launched in 2008 and watched it slide from a fast, albeit memory heavy app with no cruft to a confusing, massively bloated, unstable beast that gets worse with every iteration.

I went back to Firefox everywhere except my workstation and the change has been night and day.

It's a fair point, but at least Google gives you the means to turn this off. Also, you're getting something you can place a value on in return, so you can make a reasoned decision as to whether location services are a price worth paying.

All the same data is, however, still available to the government. And there's no off switch there.

It all comes down to how much you trust Google. For me, I trust them enough. At least they show enough respect to let you turn it off. That's a lot more than I can say about the NSA. (Plus, Google doesn't have SWAT teams ready to smash down my door at 3am).

It's a location-driven, search-driven, email-driven user interface that reads your, well 1) searches, 2) emails/contacts/birthdays/meetings, and 3) location and delivers you what it thinks will be the most relevant information to you.
Have an Amazon package? It will read your email from Amazon, parse the tracking info, and display the tracking info for you.
Read a blog recently? It will display the latest blog post as soon as it's updated.
Searched for "March Madness"? It'll display scores, game broadcast times, ticket prices, etc.
Searched for "Frozen showtimes"? It'll display showtimes at the nearest theaters.
I'm not saying it isn't creepy. But the service is pretty neat...

You forgot my favorite feature: It looks at appointments on my calendar and, as long as they have an entry in the location field which can be unambiguously parsed by Google Maps, prompts me when I need to leave to get there on time. 10-15 minutes before I need to leave, based on current traffic conditions, my phone chimes and tells me "You need to leave by...".

Google now incorporates things such as your search history and your emails to provided a customized start page.

So if Google knows you live in Atlanta, GA it will show you the weather for Atlanta. If you have a flight booked to San Francisco, you will also see the weather for your destination and confirmation of whether your flight is on time - this happens automatically if the flight confirmation went to your gmail account.

If you search for an address or store on your desktop computer, Google Now on your ph

Google now incorporates things such as your search history and your emails to provided a customized start page.

Unfortunately in the process of doing this they abandoned the incredibly handy iGoogle [wikipedia.org] page despite much protest but Google's "solution [google.com]" was to tell everyone to switch to the Chrome browser from whatever browser you're using.

No thank you I'll continue to use Firefox and use igHome [ighome.com] or My Yahoo! [yahoo.com] instead.

Google Now sounds really cool on paper, but I've never actually found it useful. I was intrigued when it claimed it would show you tracking information for packages shipped to you, but I never got it to work (Gmail cards are enabled, and I tried it with multiple Gmail addresses).

The quality of and speed of it's voice recognition is impressive, though.

I don't have it personally (lack of compatible devices), but two gals I know both have had it tell them when it's time to head off for appointments; one flies a lot, and it's alerted her with the time to leave for flight #___ that it picked up from her email automatically.

However flying so much, she often changes flights last minute, and also doesn't bother getting to the airport that much ahead of time given pre-screening. She laughed one day having landed, turned on her phone and subsequently got an now

The quality of and speed of it's voice recognition is impressive, though.

I actually use Google Speech for an application that I'm building. There's no official API for it, but what you can do is record speech to a FLAC file with specific parameters, pass said file to a particular URL via libcurl, and after a few seconds you'll get back info in JSON format which will provide the text of the recognition as well as a confidence level. It's really quite impressive.

I have the opposite experience. I actually like having a system where if I search for the address on the store and then walk out of the house my phone instantly thinks I'm going to that store and offers a traffic prediction and navigation. I like how it identified where I was flying based on my search for a flight and then proceeded to remind me. I also like it summarises stocks I own based of flight searches, the current weather depending on where you are. My personal favourite is it telling me the traffic

I have never - in any way - been adversely affected by any amount of "personal" data Google has collected from me, nor have I been adversely affected by anything Google has done with the aforesaid "personal" data.

So it's out for Windows, OSX, and ChromeOS . . . but what about normal desktop Linux? I'm hoping it's because they're spending a bit more time making the normal-Linux implementation follow the Desktop Notifications Specification [gnome.org] that KDE, GNOME (and its diaspora) and others implement.

was excited to see this. went and installed the dev channel chrome to make sure i got it. started it up and got a nice notification saying it was turned on. neat. then nothing. no notifications. nothing at all.

typical behavior from google now. the idea is so simple, but it never seems to work right for me despite having it turned on since inception and allowing google full access to my location. just *some* off the oddities,

1. despite never, ever going to the gym at any other time then between 7-8.30 in the